After spending over 50 years on and around the water, I have realized that without strong fisheries laws and effective conservation measures, the future of salt water fishing, and America's living marine resources, is dim. Yet conservation is given short shrift by national angling organizations and the angling press. I hope that this blog will incite, inform and inspire salt water fishermen to reclaim their traditional role as the leading advocates for the conservation of America's fisheries.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

AND SO IT BEGINS...

For three years, life at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management
Council was fairly peaceful.

Finally, the data could no longer be ignored. Thanks to the lack of new fish entering the
stock, the summer flounder biomass was falling, while fishermen, enjoying the
bounty provided by the healthy 2008 and 2009 spawns, were beginning to overfish
the stock.

At first, it appeared that the annual catch limit might be
reduced by 43%; fishing-related businesses were outraged. The Mid-Atlantic Council’s Science and
Statistics Committee, hoping to forge the sort of compromise that might stave
off a new war, reviewed their data and determined that a lesser, 29% reduction
would still prevent overfishing. That
compromise, coupled with estimates of reduced fishing effort in key
fluke-catching states, allowed regulations to remain unchanged in 2016.

The decision was the only one that they could make; with few
new fish entering the population, they needed to reduce the number of fish
being removed from the population in order to maintain an adequate spawning
stock.

Still, it made the coming fight inevitable. The upcoming reductions are big enough that
they’re likely to cause some real economic discomfort to the recreational
fishing industry, and the industry isn’t going down without a fight.

Thus, the first salvos of the Second Fluke War were fired a
few days ago, when a piece in The
Fisherman magazine (which always caters to the needs and desires of its
advertisers), with the title “Will
Angry Anglers Respond to Fluke Fiasco?” appeared.

Given that title, and a lead sentence that read

“I’m about to really tick you off,”

it was clear that the article, although billed as a
“feature,” would be a lopsided propaganda piece intended to elicit a knee-jerk
reaction from anglers and incite them to oppose the harvest reductions before
they had a chance to think about why such cuts might be needed.

The author reinforced that impression when he continued

“Seriously, reading any further is just going to make you
incredibly angry.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat this, the coastwide quota for
summer flounder (fluke) in 2017 is expected to be cut by about 40%. That means a shorter season, lower bag, an
increase in size limits, or any combination of the three.

“Pardon my French, but I told you that you’d be pissed.”

Over all, it’s really a remarkable piece, requiring a reader
to churn through two full pages (in the on-line version) of hype before, in the
last full paragraph, getting just an inkling of why the harvest reductions are
needed. But even then, the article only
mentions in passing that

“NOAA Fisheries is showing diminished recruitment of new
fish,”

without revealing that the stock has experienced six
consecutive years of below-average spawns (something that readers might
want to know) and admitting that such poor recruitment will impact the future
size of the spawning stock.

The author even took pains to suggest that NOAA Fisheries could
be responsible for the poor spawns, by asking

“could it be all the tinkering over the past 8 years, the
increasing size limits and intensified harvest on broodstock fluke that
actually impacted the overall biomass and recruitment numbers?”

There’s no evidence that managers actually did cause the problem, but
the author apparently didn’t want to miss any opportunity to poison anglers’ views of the current management system.

“Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the
diminution of the love of truth by the falsehoods which interest dictates and
credulity encourages.”

Now, that’s a statement fit for the Fluke
Wars, where folks with a vested economic interest in killing more fish feed a
distorted version of the truth to trusting anglers, who are all too willing to
believe in so-called “leaders” and are thus exploited to achieve others’ goals.

The truth took a hit when The Fisherman, perhaps trying to scare anglers into opposing the
cuts, wrote that

“The result [of the proposed reductions] would be something
in line with a two-fish bag limit for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and
perhaps even Rhode Island, a 19-inch minimum size and a three-month season
spanning June, July and August at best,”

“NOAA Fisheries and the Mid-Atlantic Regional [sic] Fishery
Management Council are considering cutting 2017 summer flounder recreational
quota by up to 40%.

“Unfortunately, this decision is being based on an outdated
benchmark stock assessment from 2013.”

Aside from the questionable accuracy of those statements—the
“recreational quota,” more properly the annual catch limit, will be cut by 30%,
not 40%, and it’s questionable whether a three-year-old stock assessment,
particularly one that is updated every year, can be reasonably considered
“outdated”—it's striking that ASA’s release didn’t mention
the summer flounder recruitment issue at
all, thus effectively misleading anglers by withholding information
that they need in order to make an informed decision on the issue.

“Rebuilding efforts increased that stock size to historic
levels of abundance in 2007. Since that
time, the stock has displayed average to below average recruitment and the
spawning stock biomass has dipped…”

While that still doesn’t capture the full extent of the
recruitment problem, RFA at least came close to admitting that the problem
exists…

What is somewhat reassuring is the fact that at least some anglers
seem to be able to see through all of the smoke.

“Article is a bit lacking…Seems the inshore folks like me get
very few keepers, lots of shorts, maybe it is a good time to shorten the season
rather than hike the size limits again.”

The other wrote

“I’m all for massive cuts to recreational (AND commercial)
flounder. It seems like the entire
coastal policy is set up with no consideration for the fish stock. Instead, it seems like it is based on how
many fish and how small a fish they can catch in NY and CT. The last 3 years have seen a drop-off in
recreation catches here in RI…I love flounder.
It’s my favorite fish to catch and eat.
I need one or two 18-22” fish from a day’s outing to feed my
family. The fact that the limits have
been down in the 16”-range and up at the 8-fish range is unacceptably high to
ensure the quality of the stock.”

Anglers such as those, who actually take the time to think
about summer flounder management, and aren’t stampeded onto the “no harvest
reductions” bandwagon, pose a real problem for the American Sportfishing
Association and similarly-minded groups.

And that’s a good thing, because the fluke, like all of
America’s marine resources, belong in the end to those anglers, and to every
other angler and every other citizen of the nation alive today, and in a very
real way, even to those yet unborn, who should all have the right to
experience the joy of fishing in a vital, abundant ocean, and not in one that
has been plundered for an industry’s short-term gain.

The Second Fluke War has already started. It promises to be a brutal affair, fought
with deception and guile. Yet in the
end, if anglers don’t allow themselves to be deceived or distracted, but
instead focus only on facts and the future, victory can still be theirs.

1 comment:

We here in ct. Are so engorged with seabass. I think both scup an fluke are going to have a hard time increasibg there population. I have found every living creatures in the belly of a seabass.I can tolerate a reduction but its time for the science people to remove themselves away from their computers and visit the fishing grounds in person.Good data is needed, often interviewers collect lies at launch ramps multiply a few report times vehicles there and add a few. A few years ago false data reported the state of ct. Landed nearly 400 keeper fluke everyday all season long.All other fishiers are very strong so why not focus on fluke these next few year.Ps. Can anyone explain why nj never observes these recommendations?